• Joi Ito head of MIT Media Lab name drops R3 in an inaccurate manner: “Here, Ito compared San Francisco startup Coinbase to AOL and R3 to Minitel, drawing an example of how successful blockchain companies today have to provide a full stack of services that might one day be served by open networks.”  Based on his past public comments, Ito doesn’t seem very familiar with the enterprise DLT landscape and what is being built (and for whom).
  • Last week there was a very expensive bug for Ethereum, specifically for the Parity implementation, locking up as much as $280 million.  Here is a technical explanation and here is an interview with the alleged hacker who sent the kill command.
  • In light of all of the volatility, worth revisiting Angela Walch’s presentation from this past summer on some of the risks.
  • The Tapscott blockchain fund aborted its public listing after some revelations that the Tapscotts put fake info into their deck.
  • Anthony Lewis (R3) got quoted in a Bloomberg piece on the conflation of “Bitcoin and Blockchain”
  • ICOs are an amazing social experiment in seeing who doesn’t do any research before investing: two founders of an ICO that Nathaniel Popper originally investigated, resigned after it was found they had legal problems before
  • UPS joined the Blockchain in Trucking Alliance (press)
  • Multichain hit 2.0 in its preview release (LinkedIn)
  • Allianz did a prototype in captive insurance market (Finextra)
  • Hu Liang formally announced Omniex (LinkedIn)
  • BP, Shell lead plan for blockchain-based platform for energy trading (Reuters)
  • A source close to the matter says that there are now over 50 financial institutions in the South African consortia.  And one region bank will begin to sell BTC and ETH directly to clients.

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